So It Goes: Poems

Having read strong work by Grennan in The New Yorker magazine in recent years, I decided to try him at book length. This handsomely printed trade paperback offers a large selection of poems, most of them published in the most distinguished poetry magazines in America (one is also from Irish Times). There is no questioning Grennan's skill as a wordsmith; his turns of phrase evoke scenes with a hallucinatory accuracy. The book as a whole is rather heavy, though, because the majority of it recounts the writer's sad struggle with his mother's slow death. A Wordsworthian at heart, Grennan recollects in tranquillity the incidents that most struck his senses. For my money (the book costs $14.00), the best material here are his poems on animals ("Towards Dusk the Porcupine," "Bat," and "Horses," the last of which is the best in the book) and "Angel Looking Away," an extraordinary blending of a Florentine Renaissance bas-relief with a 20th century scene of political torture. That is Grennan doing what other poets can or do not.